Joshua Jung

@joshua@social.tupo.space
116 Followers
298 Following
668 Posts

Based in the Southern German countryside, I develop web applications for a living and mobile apps for fun.

👍 Family, cats, Italian food, piano, Apple, Formula 1, quiet weekends, relational data models, rational decision-making.

👎 Heat, chronic illness, meetings that could have been a Slack message, populism.

Posts in English and German. PSA: You can filter your timeline by language!

Clarence was beginning to suspect that his mother wasn't coming back

Okay, das ist jetzt gut genug, um's mal zu releasen.

Pan5008 ist eine HTML- und CSS-Vorlage, um mit Pandoc halbwegs mit DIN 5008 konforme Briefe aufzusetzen. Es kommt ganz ohne LaTeX aus und ist deshalb angenehmer anzupassen fĂŒr Leute, die in Webtechnologien zu Hause sind.

Eingabedokumente können Markdown sein, oder prinzipiell beliebige andere von Pandoc unterstĂŒtzte Formate.

Es gibt "Profile", um z.B. bequem unterschiedliche Designs zu definieren.

https://codeberg.org/scy/pan5008

#Pandoc #DIN5008

I think about this a lot.

AI is hurting engineers.

Many new engineers think the AI is smarter than they are. It's not.

You're paid to think about the problem. One important way you learn to think about the problem is to go through the exercise of writing code—especially the boring parts early in your career.

So if you're new to this, turn off Github Copilot and struggle on some of it for longer than is comfortable. Learning takes place at the edge of comfort.

The key to coding productivity is your Mental Model: your own understanding of how all the software and APIs are interacting.

With AI, you aren’t strengthening the mental model in your head and really that’s what employers are paying you for: your experience just boils down to the knowledge in your head.

For junior developers, AI is candy: no nutritional value at all. Eat your vegetables, read lots of code and develop that mental model.

Das Letzte, was Julia Klöckner vor ihrem Herzkasper sieht:

#DIEGRÜNEN

I got laid off today. Eek!

I am looking for a role as a staff software engineer (backend focus) working on high-volume large-scale distributed systems.

Some keywords: backend / Ruby / Ruby on Rails / Go (Golang) / AWS / Terraform / frontend / Type­Script / React / full-time / remote-first

Some more details on what I offer here: https://denisdefreyne.com/notes/get-me-a-job-2025/

repost = ❀

#GetFediHired #Ruby

Get me a job in 2025

A note written by Denis

denisdefreyne.com

Now you’ve got a chance to get an awesome pixel portrait avatar, such as mine!
More info on @Iconfactory ’s website:

https://iconfactory.com/pixelportraits/

Go get one - or five!

The EU is currently congratulating itself because it managed to get a hashtag banned on TikTok in relatively little time.

LLMs encode the meanings of terms as vectors along many semantic dimensions in a semantic space ("latent space"). A concept, then, is a position in that space with a certain diameter — a kind of fuzziness or vagueness.

When I type something into ChatGPT or a recommender system, the input is broken down into tokens, and these tokens are mapped to such vectors.

“I want pizza” becomes:

["I", "want", "pizza", "."]

The tokens are then internally mapped to embeddings, like:

“cat” → [0.24, -1.12, 0.58, 
]
“dog” → [0.22, -1.09, 0.60, 
]

That is, a list of numbers (often normalized between -1 and 1). But usually there are far more dimensions than shown here — an embedding typically has thousands of dimensions.

The latent space — the semantic space — is self-organizing. That happens during training. We don’t know what each dimension in the space represents.

The encoding has meaning. When look at the vectors for "man" and "woman" and for "king" and "queen", we can substract "man" from "woman" and "king" from "queen" and compare the difference vectors. They are almost, but not quite the same – because the difference between these words to us is almost, but not quite the same, in meaning.

LLMs use these embeddings and their internal model to “compute the next output token.”

Recommender systems use such embeddings to compare vectors and find things that are similar to the thing we already have.

So a recommender learns everything that’s relevant to a user, and a modern recommender represents the user through a collection of vectors:

"Interested in travel, digital policy, databases, bikes."

These are all concepts that may also be near other concepts in the space.

At the same time, the recommender classifies content in the same space, and can find content that lies close to one of the user’s sub-interests — or content that’s new, but still compatible.

A modern recommender separates a user’s interests into distinct areas and can decide what the user is interested in right now — meaning, which of the various user interests is currently active. Then, this time, it might only serve database content, and next time only bike content.

A modern recommender will also deliberately serve content that almost — but not quite — matches the user’s interests, to test how wide the bubble is around the center of that interest vector. So a bike session might also include urbanism, city development, and other nearby topics, and the recommender will watch carefully to see what kind of response that triggers — refining its recommendations based on that feedback.

A modern recommender will also know where the available content clusters are and prioritize content that is both relevant to the user and performs well or has current production capacity. In other words, where user interest and available content overlap well.

And a modern recommender will reevaluate every twenty minutes (“Pomodoro”, or “method shift” in educational theory) and attempt to shift the theme — to test whether another known interest can be reactivated.

That’s how TikTok works.

You can ban a hashtag on TikTok (“#skinnytok”).

But as long as related concepts are marketable and socially accepted — or even demanded — that won’t prevent anything.

As soon as you browse categories like “model,” “weight loss,” “fitness,” or “slim,” TikTok will slowly and systematically pull you into the same region, and the end result will be the same.

The actual language, the meaning, is encoded in the tokens of the latent space of the model, not in the words that are used (or prohibited).

And the content density in the models coordinate system will gently push things into certain clusters. If you feed the system with the right interests, you will always drift – relatively quickly even – into the same neighborhood and then learn their current slang to get there with a single word.

No matter what the word actually is.

A similar example, using GenAI instead of a recommender:

"Draw a superheroine, an Amazon warrior that can fly and deflect bullets, running over a battlefield in the first world war."

These 21 words do not say "Wonder Woman", they do not even go near comics, DC, or similar things.

Yet they draw a thousand-dimensional hyberbubble in latent space, the totality of knowledge known to ChatGPT, and the end result leaves just one choice – produce this blatant copyright violation.

I can trigger content with intent, not even going near the keywords that would be associated with it.

This is how jailbreaks work in LLMs, and that is also how you jailbreak Tiktok bans.

Also, I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but I'll say it again:

Part of your job as a senior is to tell your juniors about your fuckups. The embarrassing cringe reckless and lazy bullshit that you did when you were new, and the various times you brought down Prod. We ALL did it sometime. And then tell them: the moment you realized you fucked up, I know, the impulse is to try and cover it up, but don't do it. Come to the seniors you trust, and they'll help you unfuck it, and fight management tooth and claw like mamma and pappa bears to defend you from any shitheads in management. Because that's what our seniors did to us.

×
I think about this a lot.

@pezmico it is not enough to recognize but one must also stop this mind virus* from propagating. the core counterargument is: there is more than enough space for twice more people as we are today. all it requires is a reduction in waste production, and there are so many blatantly optimizable avenues here. as long as states refuse to cooperate even on the bare humane minimum to stop global warming, we don't need to discuss killing people.

* as in "meme"; see ff discussion

@pezmico or, even better put as i have once heard a character say this in fiction: "you just want to kill people. you can't wait to do it."

@lritter I agree with you, but want to point out how pervasive eugenic thinking is in a lot of us, unwillingly and unconsciously. You respond to a warning about eugenics with the right-wing eugenic "mind virus" while there are very good words like e.g. "ideology." And I'm sorry to say, words do matter in fighting supremacist and eugenic thinking.

@pezmico

@Heidentweet @pezmico ideology is not a good word either. nothing is good words because the fuckers (there's a good word) take whatever verbiage intellectuals like us come up with and misappropriate it to attack the ideas that we hold dear.

in german parliament, putin's far right party frequently uses the word "ideology" to describe the fight against global warming.

nothing is good words and yet we need to speak.

@lritter @Heidentweet @pezmico "Mind virus" is problematic specifically because it relies on the idea of sickness as making people "bad." Viruses do not make people into Nazis. Being sick makes you less privileged and more in danger, sick people are othered by society which prevents them from accessing help. One of the ways that we other sickness is by correlating sickness with things like right-wing ideologies.

This is not about how right-wing pundits learn the vocabulary of leftists and weaponize it. This is about ableism.

@s3a @Heidentweet @pezmico you misunderstand. this is more like a computer virus. but yes. do not use the term "mind virus". i used a more popular interpretation of the idea of memes. but meme is also burned. we'll have that discussion every other week. best is we use no term for longer than 3 days.
@lritter @Heidentweet @pezmico I don't misunderstand. Your words have impact beyond your intent and you are being informed of that harmful impact. You're welcome to keep using the harmful words you've chosen to use, but you will be doing so knowing you are participating in the very harms you're trying to rail against going forward.
@s3a @Heidentweet @pezmico got it. thank you for educating me.
@pezmico any argument made by white people that focuses on “overpopulation” is suspect
@cthon1c @pezmico
Strangely, you never see people like this say anything along the lines of, "People are consuming way too many resources on this planet and that's why I think myself and everyone in my economic strata and above should just go walk into the sea until the planet reclaims our bodies."

@pezmico

Already saw this with Covid. All these leftists talking about the revolution and not a mask in sight in most cases.
Everyone is a eugenicist in the same way everyone is racist.

@pezmico It's the exact same ideology we already hear with COVID.

@pezmico The amazing thing to me in that mindset is their absolute certainty that they will survive.

Grant (solely for the purpose of illustration) every bit of their shitty attitude, you'd still have to be very stupid to be certain you'd survive.

@pezmico This theory fits with conservative goals now

@pezmico

Hi from New Orleans, aware this was already happening in 2005.

#NewOrleans

@pezmico Exactly. We do not have a population problem, we have a capitalism problem. Mao was right. The wealthy would rather kill everyone than let go of their wealth. We fight their greed, or they kill everyone. It's that simple.

@anolandria @pezmico I'm not sure about this. I don't see over-consumption and over-population as mutually exclusive here. They can both be problems for the planet, even if one (over-consumption by wealthy countries) is currently the bigger impact.

8.2 billion is *a lot* of people and it's hard to imagine this many of us living comfortably and safely on our one planet for even hundreds of years, without massive social, economic, and technological changes.

I'm in New Zealand and 8.2 billion people living even like a low income New Zealander would very quickly wreck the world. Yet, as a country NZ is never going to give away most of its wealth to poorer countries.

Thinking longer term will need us to find a better balance between per-person consumption and population size, one that fits within what the planet can sustainably provide for us.

(Sorry for the long response. I have no idea how we get to there from the mess we're in now.)

@joncounts @anolandria @pezmico "It's hard to imagine" isn't an argument, friend.

@joncounts

This planet produces food enough for 12 billion people, but capitalists profit from enforced scarcity. E.g. before grain gets to a bakery, it has been traded 100x for profits of the top 10%. You can exercise that imagination of yours and unlearn capitalist thinking.

@anolandria @pezmico

@Heidentweet @anolandria @pezmico “Supplying a sufficient and healthy diet for every person while keeping our biosphere largely intact will require no less than a technological and sociocultural U-turn, the authors wrote. It includes adopting radically different ways of farming, reduction of food waste and dietary changes”

https://news.uchicago.edu/story/feeding-10-billion-people-earth-possible-and-sustainable-scientists-say

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0465-1

Feeding 10 billion people on Earth is possible—and sustainable, scientists say

Study co-author: ‘We have to rethink global agriculture and our current behavior’

University of Chicago News
@pezmico this kind of thinking was big among ostensibly environmentalist writers in the 60s and 70s when the big worry was overpopulation. At the time, of course, most of the less developed world had very high birthrates so it conveniently put the onus on poor countries, not rich ones. There was a lot of ugly just under the surface.
@pezmico It's why Trump's backers want Denmark and Canada - they need somewhere to go to escape the poors.
@pezmico scarcity forces people to actually examine who they consider in thier group. Some consider all life on earth as one group, David Attenborough I would imagine is amoung them. Some only consider humans, Bill Gates eliminating polio from his group. Sometimes the group is smaller, some people feel like taking care of themselves trumps everything and everyone else. It’s how people treat those outsiders that tell you who they are, not those closest to them.
@pezmico I think about that a lot too. The part of the world that contributes the most greenhouse gases will NOT be the part of the world that suffers the most.
@pezmico Really, nothing is inevitable except climate situation gets worse so fast that the invitability is for all human beings, really.

In all cases: or all or noone.
@pezmico Which reminds me of Jean-Marc Jancovici a lot. Or Anti Tech Resistance.
@pezmico Si y'en a qui doutent toujours que Jean-Marc Jancovici est de la graine de fascite, lisez ça, et allez écouter ses derniÚres sorties populationistes.
@KekunPlazas @pezmico celui qui a dit que chaque citoyen ne devrait avoir droit qu'à un seul trajet par avion dans sa vie ? ça me semblait plutÎt égalitaire comme discours, plutÎt que favorisant une élite
@ouroukaye On parle eugénisme dans les milieux écologistes et donc écofascisme, je dis qu'il a un discours populationniste en lieu avec l'écologie, et tu réponds un truc complÚtement à cÎté du sujet. On trouve assez facilement ses positions écofascistes sur la démographie.
@KekunPlazas un fasciste eugéniste qui propose des solutions égalitaires, ça me semble un peu paradoxal. je m'attendrais plutÎt à ce qu'il propose des solutions favorisant les individus "valables".
j'ai entrĂ© "j m jancovici population" sur google et je tombe seulement sur des discours disant que la surpopulation mondiale va poser des problĂšmes. J'ai pas vu autre chose que ça, j'ai peut ĂȘtre loupĂ© mais je chercherai plus tard.

@pezmico

I mostly think about how easy it is for people to let wildlife, i.e., animals of other species, and plants and bugs, die in "natural disasters" or "manmade disasters" and how easy it is to go from a mindset of neglect of the consequences of our actions toward other creatures, to a mindset of neglect toward members of our own species, which we also neglect, but also favor when it comes to ideologies.

This mindset that neglects nature will also neglect any human being's nature, and will consider it subjugable.

@aka_quant_noir I think it all comes down to make people aware of their own internalized ways of thinking and whether they apply them unprocessed to how they act and what they communicate.

E.g. every person is (unknowingly) more or less racist due to various reasons.

The question is: how do people translate this internal biases into words and actions? Are they even aware of their biases? If so: are they willing (even capable) to differentiate between their thoughts and actions?

@pezmico

@pezmico
Eugenicist logic has been especially easy to spot since COVID hit—unfortunately, it turns out to be how most people think. (I note the date on that screenshot is from 2019.)
@pezmico Necropolitics are in full swing...
@pezmico "Nuclear winter will save us from the climate emergency." - World leaders probably
@pezmico The fossil fuel industry is an atmospheric weapon of mass destruction. It has been fired by people in temperate climates and will kill mostly people in tropical climates. It's thus a racially targeted tool of genocide.

@pezmico

I will just go through the replies here and block the couple of accounts who will show up trying to excuse treating anyone as expendable.

@pezmico Yes, they believe not just climate disaster but also the spread of disease (see: pandemic) is to their own advantage because they believe they are superior and thus "survivors".

Its a branch of Social Darwinism, a pseudo-scientific view on natural selection.

@pezmico Pop critiques of eugenics often don't address the underlying SD idea, but SD is the science-y part that people find attractive.
@tasket @pezmico no mystery here. its the real rule of law in the US
@pezmico Summarizing what Dante intimates in the Inferno: The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality"
@pezmico @chartier Somewhat relatedly, I find it “interesting” just how different Trumps response is to bad things happening in one of his states (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8zjk5yx8wo), versus similar things happening in one that doesn’t belong to him. (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/top-house-republican-says-should-be-conditions-california-wildfire-aid-2025-01-13/)
Camp Mystic buildings were removed from flood map, US media reports - BBC News

The camp where 27 girls died successfully challenged initial risk designations by US regulators, according to reports.

BBC News
@pezmico Thank you, human beings deserve to be on this planet like all other life. The forces of capitalism that drive the climate crisis are hurting us too. We cannot separate ourselves from the rest of the world but that means we *belong* here too. "Humans are the virus" types are on the eco-fascist pipeline and it's never the top few percents they consider these oh so terrible parasites, the ones actually benefitting from wrecking the Earth...
@pezmico Innit funny how people who think somebody needs to die for something never mean themselves...?